The Yellow Wallpaper Feminism Essay

Today, Gilman is remarkably well-known for her semi-autobiographical short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” There are numerous feminist analyses about Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Yellow Wallpaper in relation to her tragic life and the medical diagnosis in the 1900s. In fact, these analyses have been from a feminist perspective associated with marriage and the medical treatment women received due to postpartum psychosis. Feminist critics assumed that the patriarchy of the late nineteenth century was the cause for the insanity of the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper. Carol Ruth Berkin, one of the writers of the “Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” points out that marriage and motherhood were Gilman’s problems and her frustration to
In this particular reference, Gilman emphasized that her work has a general analysis of women’s situation to which she had a different view. She addresses that women in the early 1900s had no ambitions to aspire for bigger things by confusing marriage with domestic service. Other sources reaffirm these claims in different ways but with the same approach. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz in her “Wild Unrest” book, analyses Gilman’s midlife crisis and the causes of her depression – which Gilman called the “wild unrest” in her untitled poem. Horowitz highlights Gilman’s deep distress, which consisted of her inner war between her “two strong natures.” These two tragic factors were Gilman’s female side and the self that in her mind had no sex according to Horowitz. Gilman’s female side was the eagerness to find a man’s love and its full expression in marriage and create a family but in her own way. Gilman’s other side was the need to be independent to create the consciousness about women’s inequalities by writing her thoughts to convince society of her ideas (Horowitz